Wolfgang Denk, exhibition organizer and founding director of the Kunsthalle Krems and the nitsch museum in Mistelbach, died on Good Friday at the age of 75, according to a broadcast on Tuesday. The Lower Austrian was an artist himself. This Friday evening there will be a commemoration as part of the opening of the exhibition “New Paintings 1919 – 2023 from the Homelands” in the Alte Schmiede in Schönberg am Kamp (Krems district).
Denk was the founding director of the Kunsthalle Krems (1991-1997), the nitsch museum (2004-2007) and the Susanne Wenger Foundation Museumsgalerie Krems. “Although he spends a large part of his working life as a museum director and exhibition organizer, his own painting, expressing himself artistically and thus communicating with the world and his counterpart was a real matter of the heart,” says the broadcast. Denk’s painting is often associated with the terms of different styles such as abstract expressionism, color field painting and tachisme, because he partially resorted to painting techniques of poured painting and action painting.
Denk was born on September 17, 1947 in Seitenstetten and grew up in St. Valentin in the district of Amstetten. After graduating from high school in Linz, he completed an apprenticeship as a model carpenter at the Steyr works from 1964 to 1967. At the same time, he began to work as an artist and, after completing his training, founded the Pfarrgasse Gallery in Steyr. On numerous journeys he collected “a wealth of experiences that become a source of inspiration for his own art and the way he thinks about art,” it said.
From 1995 Denk lived and worked in Zöbing, a part of Langenlois in the district of Krems. A serious accident in 2011 and a year and a half in hospital became a physical and psychological challenge. As an artist, he made a new start and developed a new abstract visual language, which from 2019 condensed into the “DENK ART vocabulary”. The Plasticolorotype technique was developed – “a way of varying star-shaped basic elements in irregular rows, which determines his new position in painting”. Solo exhibitions took place in 2021 in the Lower Austrian Documentation Center for Modern Art and in the GALERIE-Halle LINZ as well as in 2022 in the forumschlosswolkersdorf and in the Blue and Yellow Quarter Gallery in St. Peter in der Au.